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Routine violent deaths of children that the president feared may already be here

Gunfire's young victims

By Monika Mathur and Suzanne Gamboa The Associated Press

Posted:
12/25/2012 12:01:00 AM MST

Updated:
12/25/2012 01:51:26 AM MST

President Barack Obama pauses during a Dec. 16 speech at an interfaith vigil for the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting at Newtown High School in Newtown, Conn. (Associated Press file)

Before 20 first-graders were massacred at school by a gunman in Newtown, Conn., first-grader Luke Schuster, 6, was shot to death in New Town, N.D. Six-year-olds John Devine Jr. and Jayden Thompson were similarly killed in Kentucky and Texas.

Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6, died in a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, while 6-year-old Kammia Perry was slain by her father outside her Cleveland home, according to an Associated Press review of 2012 media reports.

Yet there was no gunman on the loose when Julio Segura-McIntosh died in Tacoma, Wash. The 3-year-old accidentally shot himself in the head while playing with a gun he found inside a car.

As he mourned with the families of Newtown, President Barack Obama said the nation cannot accept such violent deaths of children as routine. But hundreds of young child deaths by gunfire — whether intentional or accidental — suggest it might already have.

Between 2006 and 2010, 561 children age 12 and younger were killed by firearms, according to the FBI's most recent Uniform Crime Reports. The numbers each year are consistent: 120 in 2006; 115 in 2007; 116 in 2008, 114 in 2009 and 96 in 2010. The FBI's count does not include gun-related child deaths that authorities have ruled accidental.

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"This happens on way too regular a basis and it affects families and communities — not at once, so we don't see it and we don't understand it as part of our national experience," said Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

The true number of small children who died by gunfire in 2012 won't be known for a couple of years, when official reports are collected and dumped into a database and analyzed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects to release its 2011 count in the spring.

Webster said children are more likely to die by gunfire at home or in the street. They tend to be safer when they are in school, he said.

None of the 61 deaths reviewed by The Associated Press happened at school.

Gun violence and its toll on children has been an issue raised for years in minority communities.

The NAACP failed in its attempt to hold gun makers accountable through a lawsuit filed in 1999. Some in the community raised the issue during the campaign and asked Obama to make reducing gun violence, particularly as a cause of death for young children, part of his second-term agenda.

"Now that it's clear that no community in this country is invulnerable from gun violence, from its children being stolen ... we can finally have the national conversation we all need to have," said Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP.

This year's gun deaths reviewed by the AP show the problem is not confined to the inner city or is simply the result of gang or drug violence, as often is the perception.

Faith Ehlen, 22 months, Autumn Cochran, 10, and Alyssa Cochran, 11, all died Sept. 6. Their mother killed them with the shotgun before turning it on herself. Police said she had written a goodbye email to her boyfriend before killing the children in DeSoto, Mo., a community of about 6,300.

Many of the children who died in 2012 were shot with guns that belonged to their parents, relatives or were simply in the home. Webster said children's accidental deaths by guns have fallen since states passed laws requiring that guns be locked away from youths or have safeties to keep them from firing.

A deadly toll

A sample of deaths by gunfire this year of children age 12 and under based on an Associated Press review of media reports:

Jan. 23: Jaymee M. Steward, 7, is accidentally shot in the head while he and his brothers, ages 4 and 13, play in a bedroom of the family home in Morristown, Tenn., with a .22-caliber gun they mistake for a toy. Jaymee dies three days later.

Feb. 20: Delric Miller, 9 months, is struck by gunfire when an attacker sprays the Detroit home he is in with an AK-47. Authorities say the gunfire is gang-related.

March 10: Jenna Carlile, 7, is shot while in the family van Iin Stanwood, Wash., with her 3-year-old brother, who grabbed the .38-caliber revolver left in the car by their father, an off-duty police officer. Jenna dies the next day.

June 2: Matthew Butwin, 7, is found with his parents and two teenage siblings in the Arizona desert in an SUV. Their bodies are burned but officials later confirm the children and mother were shot by their father, who then killed himself.

June 4: Angel Mauro Cortez Nava, 14 months, is shot by a teenager who rides by on a bicycle and opens fire on the boy's father, who is standing on a sidewalk and cradling the infant near his Los Angeles home.

Dec. 15 : Aydan Perea, 4, is shot when two men stop behind the car he is sitting in with two other men in Kansas City, Mo., and open fire. Police say Aydan is the victim of a gang dispute.

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